The Hypebeast - by Adnan Khan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Striving to get ahead in a world of scams, Hamid is caught in the fervour surrounding a charismatic social-media imam with questionable intentions.

Hamid Shaikh is a small-time crook in the big city, hoping that one of his cons will lead to riches. Tax fraud, telemarketing tricks, government scams. Whatever it takes. When he's not working the phones hustling fake promises, he dreams of a move that will finally announce his arrival.

When his girlfriend Natalie Mendoza vanishes, Hamid finds himself pulled into the orbit of former Guantanamo Bay detainee turned social-media imam Abdul Mohammad. On the surface, Abdul's organization is virtuous: they are helping other detainees rehabilitate to life outside the prison. But as Hamid dives deeper into Abdul's nebulous and luxurious world, he finds a confusing mix of religious zeal and cynical self-advancement. With his connection to the imam deepening, Hamid must decide just how far into darkness he can go before losing sight of himself.

Review Quotes

Funny, harrowing, propulsive, and tumbling with big ideas and beguiling detours, the novel rouses intrigues, and edifies with its hypebeast protagonist whose complexity, desires, and contradictions ultimately suggest the need for a better descriptor for a guy who is so much more than consumer that likes to shop for limited edition runners and thousand-dollar shirts.

Gripping and complex, Adnan Khan's newest novel, The Hypebeast, is a master class in storytelling and the exploration of fractured timelines. Khan pulls readers into his protagonist Hamid Shaikh's life, taking them in and out of time through childhood violence, fraught family dynamics, and present-day crimes that threaten Hamid's sense of being. Khan immerses us in Hamid's inner world - his fears, desires, and moral dilemmas - crafting a thought-provoking novel that is impossible to put down. Khan once again delivers a bold, riveting, and unforgettable read.

If Plato banished the poets from the Republic for fear their work would glorify bad deeds and inspire audiences to the same, someone should banish Adnan Khan's new novel from contemporary Canada. I mean this as a compliment, if premised on the glorious delusion that ethnic hustlers in contemporary Canada read literary fiction. If they did, The Hypebeast is both a how-to-guide and cautionary tale.

On the surface, the high-intensity plot swirls around money. Beneath that, it's about how the past shapes our longings and beliefs, how they sometimes blind us to danger. Hamid knows what he's running from, and his rapid, rhythmic narration gives a window into a driven if directionless psyche. Around him, the characters brim with vice and neuroticism, each one greedy for something. At the book's core lie the questions: What stories do we tell ourselves to justify our desires? And if we try to close our hands around too much, what will be left when we open them?

Simmering with danger where religion, greed, and social status collide, The Hypebeast is fast-paced, darkly funny, and compulsively readable. In Hamid Shaikh, Khan has crafted a conversation-worthy narrator - a scammer, a dreamer, a young Muslim man as ruthless as he is tender; as lost as he is driven to succeed. A sharp and twisty crime novel and love story and cautionary tale combined that reminds us desire is a real beast - and we are all at its mercy.

There's an old adage that says at any one point a novelist needs to draw from two of: experience, imagination and knowledge. Adnan Khan blends these three inputs subtly and, in so doing, produces a novel that dramatizes contemporary life - its allures and pitfalls - while being poised enough to avoid the simplicity of being emblematic.

This new novel further carves out a literary space for its author that lands at the centre of a Venn diagram consisting of the immigrant novel, the crime novel, and the masculine existentialist novel. It provides further evidence that Khan is a significant new feature in the CanLit firmament.

A confidently sprawling mess; Khan wants to say and explore a lot when it comes to faith, family, money, relationships and a hungry young man's standing in the world when he always feels caught between who he is and who he wants to be while facing a world in which "no one knew us."

A devastatingly incisive look at the intersections between scammers, online influencers, and religious leaders. Adnan Khan is an audacious writer who is attuned to the ways diasporic Asians seek connection and feel alienation today as well as the historical, cultural, and geopolitical forces that led to them.

A gorgeous, funny, heartbreaking beast of a novel.

A raucous portrait of the Age of Grift that recalls Paul Beatty at his satirical best. Khan writes like something unstoppable unleashed: truth, the future, all our thwarted dreams. A scorcher of a novel by one of our finest writers.

A skillful depiction of survival in displacement. Adnan Khan's sharp prose captures the messiness of late-capitalist life, from nightclubs to online spaces, with ease and precision. Emotionally vulnerable and tragically handsome, The Hypebeast is a keen exploration of the social structures that shape our actions and all the feelings in between. This is a masterclass in crafting the contemporary novel.

Bitter, vengeful, and understatedly funny, The Hypebeast is a twenty-first-century epic of faith and greed, alienation and rage. Khan is a serious talent.

Hilarious and exacting and knowing - The Hypebeast is thrilling and charming, a raucous bildungsroman and a devastating, essential distillation of piercing histories. A novel about our truths, our loves, how we see ourselves, the ways in which the world sees us, and our attempts to navigate the infinitudes in-between; The Hypebeast stuns. Khan will leave you in awe.

Powerful and complex - The Hypebeast is a rich odyssey about contemporary Muslims trying to make sense of this world as they strive to make their way in it. From Toronto to Mumbai to the mountains of Afghanistan, Adnan Khan's novel is large in scope and yet explores the deepest of intimacies. A compelling read.

This is a mind-boggling work of truly uncompromising twenty-first-century fiction, embodying in satire some of the deepest existential dramas of our time, an unforgettable portrait of this century's pop political spectacle. A Camus for the Camp X-Ray era. Audacious and brilliant, the scale is hyperglobal, and the voice is hyperlyrical, Delillo-esque, tragicomic. Insightful, hilarious, and beautiful, The Hypebeast is spun up and bound together with hypnotic genius.

Funny, harrowing, propulsive, and tumbling with big ideas and beguiling detours, the novel rouses intrigues, and edifies with its hypebeast protagonist whose complexity, desires, and contradictions ultimately suggest the need for a better descriptor for a guy who is so much more than consumer that likes to shop for limited edition runners and thousand-dollar shirts.

-- "Brett Josef Grubisic, The Miramichi Reader"

Gripping and complex, Adnan Khan's newest novel, The Hypebeast, is a master class in storytelling and the exploration of fractured timelines. Khan pulls readers into his protagonist Hamid Shaikh's life, taking them in and out of time through childhood violence, fraught family dynamics, and present-day crimes that threaten Hamid's sense of being. Khan immerses us in Hamid's inner world -- his fears, desires, and moral dilemmas -- crafting a thought-provoking novel that is impossible to put down. Khan once again delivers a bold, riveting, and unforgettable read.

-- "Ann Y.K. Choi, author of Kay's Lucky Coin Variety"

If Plato banished the poets from the Republic for fear their work would glorify bad deeds and inspire audiences to the same, someone should banish Adnan Khan's new novel from contemporary Canada. I mean this as a compliment, if premised on the glorious delusion that ethnic hustlers in contemporary Canada read literary fiction. If they did, The Hypebeast is both a how-to-guide and cautionary tale.

-- "Randy Boyagoda, The Globe and Mail"

On the surface, the high-intensity plot swirls around money. Beneath that, it's about how the past shapes our longings and beliefs, how they sometimes blind us to danger. Hamid knows what he's running from, and his rapid, rhythmic narration gives a window into a driven if directionless psyche. Around him, the characters brim with vice and neuroticism, each one greedy for something. At the book's core lie the questions: What stories do we tell ourselves to justify our desires? And if we try to close our hands around too much, what will be left when we open them?

-- "Jadine Ngan, Literary Review of Canada"

Simmering with danger where religion, greed, and social status collide, The Hypebeast is fast-paced, darkly funny, and compulsively readable. In Hamid Shaikh, Khan has crafted a conversation-worthy narrator -- a scammer, a dreamer, a young Muslim man as ruthless as he is tender; as lost as he is driven to succeed. A sharp and twisty crime novel and love story and cautionary tale combined that reminds us desire is a real beast -- and we are all at its mercy.

-- "Anuja Varghese, award-winning author of Chrysalis"

There's an old adage that says at any one point a novelist needs to draw from two of: experience, imagination and knowledge. Adnan Khan blends these three inputs subtly and, in so doing, produces a novel that dramatizes contemporary life -- its allures and pitfalls -- while being poised enough to avoid the simplicity of being emblematic.

-- "Moez Surani, The Grind Magazine"

This new novel further carves out a literary space for its author that lands at the centre of a Venn diagram consisting of the immigrant novel, the crime novel, and the masculine existentialist novel. It provides further evidence that Khan is a significant new feature in the CanLit firmament.

-- "Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag"

A confidently sprawling mess; Khan wants to say and explore a lot when it comes to faith, family, money, relationships and a hungry young man's standing in the world when he always feels caught between who he is and who he wants to be while facing a world in which "no one knew us."-- "The Globe and Mail"

A devastatingly incisive look at the intersections between scammers, online influencers, and religious leaders. Adnan Khan is an audacious writer who is attuned to the ways diasporic Asians seek connection and feel alienation today as well as the historical, cultural, and geopolitical forces that led to them.-- "Kevin Chong, author of The Double Life of Benson Yu"

A gorgeous, funny, heartbreaking beast of a novel.-- "Siddhartha Deb, author of The Light at the End of the World"

A raucous portrait of the Age of Grift that recalls Paul Beatty at his satirical best. Khan writes like something unstoppable unleashed: truth, the future, all our thwarted dreams. A scorcher of a novel by one of our finest writers.-- "Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of This Is How You Lose Her"

A skillful depiction of survival in displacement. Adnan Khan's sharp prose captures the messiness of late-capitalist life, from nightclubs to online spaces, with ease and precision. Emotionally vulnerable and tragically handsome, The Hypebeast is a keen exploration of the social structures that shape our actions and all the feelings in between. This is a masterclass in crafting the contemporary novel.-- "Sheung-King, author of Batshit Seven"

Bitter, vengeful, and understatedly funny, The Hypebeast is a twenty-first-century epic of faith and greed, alienation and rage. Khan is a serious talent.-- "André Forget, author of In the City of Pigs"

Hilarious and exacting and knowing -- The Hypebeast is thrilling and charming, a raucous bildungsroman and a devastating, essential distillation of piercing histories. A novel about our truths, our loves, how we see ourselves, the ways in which the world sees us, and our attempts to navigate the infinitudes in-between; The Hypebeast stuns. Khan will leave you in awe.-- "Bryan Washington, author of Lot"

Powerful and complex -- The Hypebeast is a rich odyssey about contemporary Muslims trying to make sense of this world as they strive to make their way in it. From Toronto to Mumbai to the mountains of Afghanistan, Adnan Khan's novel is large in scope and yet explores the deepest of intimacies. A compelling read.-- "David Albertyn, author of Undercard"

This is a mind-boggling work of truly uncompromising twenty-first-century fiction, embodying in satire some of the deepest existential dramas of our time, an unforgettable portrait of this century's pop political spectacle. A Camus for the Camp X-Ray era. Audacious and brilliant, the scale is hyperglobal, and the voice is hyperlyrical, Delillo-esque, tragicomic. Insightful, hilarious, and beautiful, The Hypebeast is spun up and bound together with hypnotic genius.-- "Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game"

About the Author

Adnan Khan is a screenwriter, novelist, and journalist. His first novel, There Has to Be a Knife, was named a best Canadian novel of 2019 by the CBC, and his first feature film, Shook, made its premier at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.